As promised yesterday, this month’s Geek in Review stands entirely on its own, but also goes well (if I do say so myself) with this week’s LA Daily.

As a matter of fact, I have played Atari today

“You’re the undisputed master of Combat,” I told my son. “As your reward, you get to watch me play Adventure.”

I flipped switches on the Flashback II, and was soon on my way to collect the various items required to complete my quest.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s my sword,” I said, pushing my little box against an arrow-shaped icon.

“What do you use it for?”

“Slaying Dragons!” I said, as I entered a once-simple maze of passages that the passage of time had made as vexing as it was when I was eight.

“You realize you’ve gone into that dead end five times, right?”

“Quiet you. This is how we did it back in the 80s.”

“You ran into the same dead end over and over again?”

“Yes, it was part of Reganomics.”

I finally found my way out of the maze, and approached a castle, anxious to impress Nolan by grabbing the chalice within. That’s when the dragon showed up.

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s a dragon, of course,” I said, holding the joystick out in front of me like I always did, convinced that if I moved it around, it would help me escape faster. That’s when the dragon ate me.

“This is really what you guys did for fun?”

“Well, there was this, and we’d occasionally fend off Indian attacks when we weren’t Dinosaurizing our caves, yeah.”

I say this every time I link to my Geek in Review, but I know the one time I don’t, someone’s going to lose their shit at me: my column and the newswire are Safe For Work. The rest of the site is delightfully NOT SAFE FOR WORK. If you just stay at the news page, you don’t have to worry about encountering anything naughty, but the logs aren’t going to know that, and you may have a hard time convincing your IT guys that you were just reading it for the articles.